Tuesday, March 7, 2017

I for one was thrilled to see American journalists,
especially those who inhabit the left side of the spectrum, rediscover facts. Now
I suspect that it was just a mirage. For all their ostentatious love of facts,
the media and Democratic politicians have yielded to raw emotion and have gotten
mired in speculation.

Recently, the story of Russian influence or collusion with
the Trump campaign fell apart. The facts did not support it.

Now
that we’re supposed to believe there was no real investigation of Trump and his
campaign, what else can we conclude but that there was no real evidence of
collusion between the campaign and Russia . . . which makes
sense, since Russia did not actually hack the election, so the purported
objective of the collusion never existed.

Now, however, Donald Trump has stepped on his own creditable
performance before Congress last week. He tweeted out that the former President
Obama had wire-tapped him or his campaign. And did not provide any evidence for
the claim. For those who care about facts, the absence of creditable evidence
does not mean that there is none. It means that we know of none. The absence
does not prove or disprove the claim.

Yet, speculation has proliferated, like a
conflagration that has gotten completely out of control. For a rundown of the
details, see this article by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard.

I will not try to wend my way through the charges and
countercharges, but will only note that they are not based on fact. If we care
about facts we do best to suspend judgment and also to suspend disbelief.

In any event, as has often been pointed out on this blog,
Donald Trump did not come down to us from the moon. Someone laid the groundwork
for the Trump administration. It is well and good to say that Trump has a
tenuous grip on decorum, but it is also true that his predecessor set the
standard.

Of course, no one in the media blinked when Obama was riding
roughshod over traditional standards for presidential behavior. Or when his
administration used the IRS to inhibit the free speech of his political
opponents. Or when his Justice Department made journalist James Rosen a “criminal
co-conspirator” and got access to his personal emails and phone records. Of
course, no one had a problem with this.

When Trump breeches decorum, the same media bursts into an
emotional frenzy that does not bespeak journalistic objectivity. It’s all
drama, all the time.

The
truth is that Barack Obama bears a lot of responsibility for destroying what
had been acceptable standards—the destruction of which ultimately made possible
Donald Trump’s ascendancy. While Obama now poses as a defender of decorum,
tradition, and protocol, he (in a much subtler way) flouted convention.

One has pointed out that Donald Trump was not the most qualified
candidate for the American presidency. But, to be fair and objective, one has also noted that Barack Obama was not
qualified in any sense of the term. The Obama presidency defined qualification
downward, making it coincide with charisma, and nothing else:

This [Barack
Obama] is a guy who, in not even a single term as a U.S. senator before running
for the highest office in the land, accomplished little but did try to
filibuster Sam Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court, and supported a “poison pill” to kill immigration reform. Who ran as a
celebrity, helping pave the way for the sort of hero worship that President
Trump’s fans now employ.

Lewis adds:

Think
Donald Trump is an undignified reality star? Yeah, remember the time that Obama gave an interview to a YouTube star who drinks
cereal out of a bathtub? Cultural degradation doesn’t just happen overnight.

As for Trump’s divisiveness, here too Obama paved the way.
After all, Trump took over a severely divided nation. He has not, dare we say,
united us, but he did not cause the divisions:

He [Obama]
won office at a time when America felt like it was already coming apart, and
given the opportunity to be a true post-partisan leader who could unite the
country, chose instead to run a highly partisan and ideological presidency.
That began with his choice of the divisive issue of health care reform as his landmark
legislation—Obamacare being Obama’s original sin—using every means necessary to
pass it on a party-line vote. And he frequently resorted to unilateral
decisions outside the scope of his constitutional authority. Sound familiar?

Again, we and many others have often noted that President
Obama was anything but truthful. Of course, his lies were treated by the press
as higher truths:

Do you
think President Trump was the first politician to have a casual relationship
with the truth? Then answer this: Who said, “If you like your doctor you can
keep your doctor” and that ISIS is the “JV team”?

Lewis recommends that before considering that Barack Obama
could do no wrong, we should recognize that much of what the media is accusing
Trump of doing was done by his predecessor:

By
turning his term into a never-ending, eight-year campaign, Obama established a
non-traditional presidency which begat an even more non-traditional president
as his successor. He will open even more previously-locked doors by continuing
his tradition of ignoring tradition.

Hastened
by those who should know better, the erosion and devolution of discourse is
already finding easy footholds in an already-surreal Trump Presidency. The
reverberations, sadly, could echo far beyond the four or eight years of the
current administration and tinge Presidential politics for a generation or
more.

Most of this hinges upon articles in the "mainstream" who painted this picture of several different security groups, FBI, Clapper, et al, wiretapping Trump and his associates utilizing the FISA court to facilitate this action. Either the "media was lying before or lying now about the truth as they saw it before. Either way they were lying. I am with Sam L. The Washington Post, the "viewpaper" of the shadow government, otherwise known as "Pravda on the Potomac," has 18 reporters trying to destroy Trump. A little overblown for the company paper of the federal government.I would suggest that one of the reasons the democrats have been dragging out considering Trump's people is to maintain the "deep state" cabal of leakers. I must admit I did not realize there were so many different groups like the CIA and FBI. So much of this is ILLEGAL and I can imagine that Clapper, Comey et al want this to end before we see the "Wizard" behind the wall. Those most guilty here are the first "squeaking like a stuck pig."Much of this is meant to dishearten Trump supporters, but that is not going to happen. primarily because the Left no longer controls the news or other information outlets.This maybe a better move by Trump than one expects for a variety of reasons. If you were under a constant state of attack by the government in place how would you take that "stick away?" Anyone who has spent time in the military knows that the Commanding Officer is there for a time certain whereas the accompanying power structure will be there when he leaves. Washington DC?

As author William Powers notes, “When a crowd adopts a point of view en masse, all critical thinking stops.” describes the "media" in this country along with almost everything that the left espouses. never ask today's protesters to describe what it is they are trying to accomplish other that TDS. I wonder if it is true that today's women's march was organized by men? Sort of adds new meeting to feminism. Men and those with terrorist sympathies all seem to have a place in leadership. Makes one wonder???????

Wow! The divisiveness of the Obama years had nothing to do with Republican leaders declaring immediately after he was elected that they would make Barack Obama a one term President, nothing to do with vowing to oppose everything Obama supported, and nothing to do with the attitude expressed by Rush Limbaugh that he would rather see the country go down the tubes than have any policy or program of Obama's succeed? Oh, and the divisiveness had nothing to do with the Republicans actually opposing Obama at every turn?

Also, how dare the man focus immediately on a campaign promise to extend health care coverage to the tens of millions of uninsured human beings in this country, some of whom were being bankrupted by huge medical bills because of an illness or catastrophe? The nerve of the man!

He should have been focusing on the economy that hedge fund managers and clever investment bankers had just trashed to depths close to those of 1929. [Notice that this time bankers didn't jump out of windows to their deaths; no they were bailed out by the taxpayers while large portions of the American Middle Class lost all their wealth.] How dare he not focus on our economy being brought to its knees! Oh, wait. He did. It appears that a President and even Congress can work on more than one thing at a time, that more than one piece of legislation is being considered, debated and voted on during the same time period.